Martin Ferris (Kerry North-West Limerick, Sinn Fein)

I wish to share time with Deputy Michael Healy-Rae.

The Minister and her colleagues stated there would be no threat to community employment schemes and that the review being conducted will somehow make up for the taking of two thirds of their funding. It will be interesting to know how the schemes will be able to continue to operate within the constraints of a 66% cut in the overall budget.

I will give the Minister some idea of the impact of the cuts. One of the Listowel centres has provided the following information. I have the figures from every area in Kerry and west Limerick. The funding for materials and training has been cut from €35,420 to €11,960. The fact that rent, insurance and telephone costs will remain the same, means that the cuts impact directly on the participants and on the services provided to an even greater extent than the 66% cut. They will now have only €3,860 with which to run the centre for a year. I ask the Minister or her colleagues how the centre will be able to function on this amount of money. In effect it means the centre will be unable to provide any engagement with the community in Listowel as was possible in the past. The knock-on effect will also impact on local businesses and service-providers as well as the local tidy towns committee, the family resource centres, the Society of St. Vincent de Paul and even the flagship event which is the annual Listowel Writers' Week.

The scheme in Listowel has had a significant impact on the participants. Unemployed people who have lost personal and social confidence have rebuilt this sense of their own value along with acquiring practical skills and qualifications. By undermining community employment schemes, the Government is in effect telling those people that they might as well not bother. This fits with the overall depressing anti-initiative and anti-employment spirit of a Government which seems to believe that the only people who need State intervention to put money in their pockets are low wage employers. Everyone else and society at large is apparently expected to thrive on cutbacks.

While the Minister continues unabated this policy of austerity that targets the most vulnerable and weak in our communities, the unemployed, those on CE schemes, DEIS schools and small rural schools, there are other people who have a responsibility, particularly the trade union leadership. They have a responsibility to defend people in need and to defend the most marginalised and those most discriminated against in our society and communities. At one time the trade union movement boasted that it had the Labour Party in its back pocket but now it is the other way around; the Labour Party has the trade union leadership in its back pocket. I appeal to the trade union leadership listening to show leadership and to fight the policies of austerity being perpetrated by this Government.

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